Why companies choose Freshdesk over Zendesk

Do you have to use a guide every time you want to chat with or talk to your customers? Then it’s time to switch to Freshdesk for a better and refreshing customer support experience. Right from setting up, onboarding your team, to scaling it as your business grows, here’s why Freshdesk wins over Zendesk. Every single time.

“Zendesk was not offering business benefit whatsoever. Freshdesk helped level the playing field. It stopped people from working in an ad-hoc way and saved us time. We filled the gaps like automation and automatic ticket assignment.”

Greg Spanner

Service Desk Manager

Travel counsellors

Deliver moments of wow in every support channel

In every support channel, you’ll find that Freshdesk offers a delightful experience to customers. As examples, email responses appear natural like they’re sent directly from your email inbox. The messaging experience is friendly and asynchronous similar to the ones powered by WhatsApp. With simple solutions for proactive support, chatbots, and automatic ticket assignment, companies using Freshdesk deliver excellent customer support.

With Zendesk, you’ll find emails come in a robotic template that makes it apparent that you’re using a helpdesk. Your customers will be asked to “reply above the line”. Unlike Freshchat’s modern messaging experience, Zendesk places customers in a queue after they’re required to fill a form in a chat window. In fact, without an option to assign tickets automatically, you’ll risk responding late to customers.

Choose a tool your team loves using

We believe happy employees make for happy customers. That’s why we’re constantly building unique features that save time and effort for agents like in-app notifications, image annotations, quick actions, and more. Agents using Freshdesk are empowered to use features that make work easy for them without any dependencies on an admin.
Zendesk users often complain about how difficult it is to use the product. Agents need to depend on an admin to create views and canned responses -- features that make work easy for them. Without simple features like notifications, agents are required to go back to cluttered email inboxes and risk missing out on important updates.

Don’t make compromises in customizing your workflows

Tickets that are pending for different reasons in Zendesk have a common status ‘on-hold’. Because their ticket status can’t be customized in Zendesk, users lack visibility and struggle with workarounds using tags (a feature similar to labels in Gmail) for business process automation. While Zendesk users use complex workarounds and worry about 'tag management', you can mirror your workflows on Freshdesk, set-up powerful automations, and understand your tickets’ lifecycle at ease.

We understand that every support team’s workflows are unique. You’ll find different options to choose from for features that enable collaboration, automatic ticket assignment, etc. In fact, because the workflows that involve support teams and field agents are different, we built a new module for field service management altogether.

Accelerate efficiency with AI/ML and bots

While Zendesk has attempted to make AI accessible for customer support, the complexity in development, usage and pricing makes it highly restrictive. You will need to depend on a service provider to just to build a simple chatbot. With Freshdesk, on the other hand, you can configure your own chatbots right out-of-the-box and effortlessly leverage AI to deliver better support.

In Freshdesk, AI makes the experience better for agents and customers alike. As examples, the agent assist bot helps in onboarding agents quickly and in carrying out routine tasks. The intelligent Thank You Detector does not reopen tickets every time a grateful customer responds with "Thank you!" or replies with an automatic "out of the office" responder. For a better self-service experience, Freshdesk lets you easily configure a chatbot that helps customers with intelligent solutions.

You don’t need to be a data scientist to draw insights

Even to view a simple report or metric in Zendesk, you’d need to learn how to build queries and pay for a product that’s entirely separate from their helpdesk. Because of this, admins are often short-sighted on operational issues with their helpdesk.

With Freshdesk, businesses can use both the pre-built curated reports and create their own custom reports and dashboards. The pre-built reports come with meaningful metrics and filters to help in identifying the right problems. For teams that use a different BI tool, Freshdesk can be seamlessly integrated using APIs.

Rated best in the industry by experts

Gartner - Customers' Choice

Forbes - Rising Stars

G2 Crowd - Top 50 Fastest Growing Products

PC Mag - Editors' Choice

Accelerate efficiency with AI/ML and bots

While Zendesk has attempted to make AI accessible for customer support, the complexity in development, usage and pricing makes it highly restrictive. You will need to depend on a service provider to just to build a simple chatbot. With Freshdesk, on the other hand, you can effortlessly leverage AI to deliver better support.

In Freshdesk, AI makes the experiences better for agents and customers alike. As examples, the agent assist bot helps in onboarding agents quickly and in carrying out routine tasks. The intelligent Thank you detector does not reopen tickets with grateful customer responses or out of office emails. For a better self-service experience, you can easily configure a chatbot that helps customers with intelligent solutions.

You’ll struggle to scale with these limitations

As businesses scale, the limitations in Zendesk have them to constantly use workarounds. While agents struggle to manage issues, businesses using Freshdesk scale at ease. Here are some examples of how enterprises struggle with Zendesk

Agents struggle with a limit of 12 ticket views. Because ticket views don’t refresh automatically, agents are required to do it manually.

Unlike Freshdesk, the sandbox does not offer automatic sync back. Once you’re done testing on your sandbox, you’ll have to carefully copy changes to your production instance.

Each automation can act on a maximum of 1,000 tickets each hour. This is despite the fact that the automations don’t scan closed tickets

With details about agents, their roles and customers being clustered into a single module, user management is arduous

The only option to be PCI compliant is a ticket field. If your team makes an error in using the ticket field, you risk security violations.

Freshdesk offers the scale and customizability that supports growth without distress. We’ve ensured that simple features don’t pose any limits and offer solutions to make scaling an enterprise easier for you. With our open API platform and unique serverless app capabilities, you can listen to backend events taking place within Freshdesk and other internal tools to ensure a seamless flow of information to build powerful integrations.

Relationships matter to us

Onboarding and Implementation

Our implementation specialists will closely work with you to put together a comprehensive shared project plan, tailored to your requirements to ensure a hassle-free go-live.

24-hour technical support

Our technical experts are available 24/7 to troubleshoot issues and provide best practices on processes with the agility your business expects.

Dedicated customer success managers

Your CSM will work with you to ensure that you meet your customer experience goals. They'll define shared success KPIs, help with scaling up your Freshdesk and review progress with you periodically.

Over 220,000 businesses use Freshdesk

Make the switch to Freshdesk today

Sign up for a free 21-day trial of Freshdesk. If you’re already using Zendesk, migrating all your data from Zendesk is as simple as a click. So, what are you waiting for?

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